


The Fire Inside, the Fire Around

by FreshBrains



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Zombie Apocalypse, Cannibalism, Community: comment_fic, Gen, POV Hannibal, Survival
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-26
Updated: 2016-08-26
Packaged: 2018-08-11 06:10:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 525
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7879564
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FreshBrains/pseuds/FreshBrains
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hannibal is alone in this dead world, and he refuses to die.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Fire Inside, the Fire Around

**Author's Note:**

> For the LJ Comment_fic prompt: [Hannibal, Hannibal Lecter, being a cannibal serves him well in the apocalypse](http://comment-fic.livejournal.com/746891.html?thread=98656907#t98656907).

A man must eat to survive, but even as the world turned to dust, Hannibal did not want to merely survive. He wanted to _thrive_.

Across the dry-grass field is a man, probably in his mid-twenties, alone with a bulging pack on his back. From where Hannibal stands, he can see a month’s worth of beard and a much longer period of hunger, but the important thing is that he’s _alive_ —warm, moving, a thing with a beating heart. He stumbles like one of the undead, and a quote comes to Hannibal’s mind from a film he’d long forgotten— _when there’s no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth._

How fortunate for him. He’s a man without a castle now. No more basements, no more deep freezers, no more cupboards and refrigerators stocked with spices and oils. He has returned to the way nature always intended him to be—a predator, living off the land, feeding in the wild, feeding off the _living._

In the abandoned warehouse he calls home, there are no mirrors, no three-piece suits, no expensive cologne. The entire place smells of blood and unwashed hair, of meat and _man_ , and a small part of him is glad Will Graham has gone his separate way. He would’ve never stood for the evidence of slaughter like Hannibal does—he always needed some semblance of humanity, even as humanity itself bled dry.

As the man starts his slow descent down the dirt road, Hannibal begins to move. He stalks cleanly and swiftly across the field, his walk no different from countless paths he’s trekked through parking lots and college campuses, through ballrooms and apartment buildings. The grass parts around his legs like water, his bare feet soundless in the dirt, and at his hip, he holds a knife.

In a world that is no more, there is no more cleaning up to be done. No bleach, no soap, no fire to burn up the evidence. His knife is clean, though. He’s not forgotten every skill. Sanitation is key, even though he only kills the living and uninfected. The undead are no more than bags of meat—it would be above anything, a lazy kill; it would be like buying frozen chicken at the store.

The man sees him coming, startles, puts up his bony hands to fight, but it’s in his eyes—he’s already dead, and he knows it. Hannibal brings down the knife in a clean cut, blood spraying in arcs across the dirt. Hannibal strips off his shirt and kneels down, next to the man, watches him choke and gurgle on his blood for a moment before deepening the cut. Once the man’s eyes go milky and unfocused, Hannibal sighs and digs in with bare hands, settling in for his supper.

Even now, Hannibal resists the term ‘cannibal’—so primal, so base, such a crude way to demote his rightful place on the food chain. He is alone in this dead world, and he refuses to die. So he will eat what comes in front of him. He is a man. He is alive.

The rest doesn’t really matter.


End file.
